Interesting Problem: Songs get lost when exporting and importing a playlist

Question

So I exported my library as a txt playlist, removed some songs, and imported that new smaller playlist, and I get the "some of the songs in the file were not imported because they could not be found."
I then exported the new playlist to compare, and there were about 200 songs that itunes wasnt able to import (even though they exist in my library). I didn't alter any of the data in the origional playlist txt doc (only deleted rows), and didn't move the files at all.
Of the files that weren't imported, I can play just fine in my Music library.
Any ideas why some of the songs exported from itunes, can't be imported as a playlist?
For troubleshooting purposes: none of the songs are protected, the largest text length in any field of the ones not imported is 195 characters, all of the songs are on a removable HDD but the HDD is connected just fine (I can see and play the songs it doesn't import back in from my library).
If this is confusing, I'll tell you what I am doing and hopefully it will make sense. I like my music labeled thusly: White Stripes, The NOT The White Stripes
The way I find to best acheive this is leave the artist field The White Stripes, but make Album Artist field White Stripes, The
So I wanted to find all the songs with artists that begin with The (and no I don't want to just search because I end up with a lot of extra stuff, and sorting by artist doesn't group all of the bands with the in the T's). So what I did was export my library as a playlist, sort by alpha in excell (where The White Stripes shows up in the T's instead of the W's), deleted everything else (except the header row of course), and tryed to import the playlist hoping I could just change stuff by selecting the playlist). But it didn't import a bunch of my songs that the program itself exported a few minutes earlier.

Answer 1

kherova wrote:
still curious why a playlist exported from iTunes is not always a vaild format for input back into iTunes
Not sure, but editing a playlist export and then importing the change back into iTunes is kind of dicey -- maybe you edited too much and cut off some important information? Glad that your ultimate goal has a solution though.